Keyboards are widely used to input data of all sorts into computers and other electronic devices. Alphanumeric keyboards, such as the QWERTY keyboard, or calculator keyboards, such as the 10-key, are common examples. Learning to type on these keyboards—called keyboarding—is important for using much of today's technology.
Best practices for keyboarding teach a default placement of the fingers over certain keys on the keyboard, known as the “home row” position. Eventually the keyboard student memorizes where each key is relative to this home row position. To learn keyboarding as an automatic skill, the same fingers need to depress the same keys each time. Keyboarding is most efficient when a student can depress keys with speed and accuracy while keeping his eyes on the sample text he is copying instead of the keys on the keyboard.
However, instead of learning where the keys are, a common problem is that a student just looks at the keyboard and uses any fingers to depress the keys. When copying from sample text, a student is tempted to look at the keyboard to find the letters, shift his eyes back to the sample text, read a few words, then look again at the keyboard to depress the keys. This method is known in the art as “hunting and pecking.” Further, because the hands hover over the keyboard, the labels on the keys are difficult to see and the student may also pull his hands away from the home row position, sometimes tucking all but one or two fingers into a fist so that the keyboard is easier to see. The result is that the budding keyboarder may hunt and peck using only one or two fingers on each hand. The student is not learning where the keys are and cannot sustain much speed and accuracy because student is constantly stopping to find the next words on the copy and then depressing the keys with any finger.
Hunting and pecking slows the rate of data entry because the keyboarder spends time searching and moving fingers to letters inconsistently, and is constantly shifting his gaze from the text or copy to the keyboard thereby creating a lot of pauses. The keyboarder spends time searching and moving hands to a letter instead of depressing keys located directly under, or nearly directly under, hands positioned in the home row position, and because the keyboarder is constantly shifting his gaze from the sample text to the keyboard. It is desirable to avoid hunting and pecking, and it is therefore desirable to implement training methods that help the student avoid hunting and pecking. It is desirable to implement training methods that help the student keep eyes on the sample text, learn each key in relation to the home row position, and consistently depress each key with the correct finger, which results in learning an automatic response in keyboarding without unnecessary pauses.